Things I've Written, Entirely Out of Context: February, March, and April 2017

There are considerably fewer excerpts this time around, despite combining three months of writing progress. What can I say? My life is busy and my muse fickle. Sorry.

Things I've Written, Entirely Out of Context:

February, March, and April 2017 Edition

She's
had many different appearances over the years, almost as many as
she's had names, but something about her presence—that or her sheer
audacity—gives her away every time. Mention a beautiful stranger
sashaying into a bar, buying drinks for all the ladies, and staring
down the catcalling drunks with piercing eyes and a smile that gives
men nightmares for months, and historians will give their colleagues
the look, roughly
translated as, “She's
shown
up again, and you'll never believe what she did this time.” And the
colleague, whether young or old, will invariably respond with another
look, one that simply means, “God help us all.”

*

“Couldn’t sleep?” Sebastian prompted.

“If I tried to sleep, I would either have nightmares that would wake me, or be kept awake dreading the nightmares to come. Clearly the solution is to not try to sleep at all and actually get some work done before I collapse of exhaustion.”

“Oh, love.” Sebastian ran his hand through the grey of Grigory’s hair, then kissed the top of his head. “That makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.”

“It made sense at the time.”

*

Stardust ran in the veins of the Kevaryese people, and it was from those stars, the vanyese, that the magic of shared souls was born. Each person, it was said, was like a star, one piece of a shattered whole, scattered across the endless void and cursed to forever wander the skies in search of their distant brethren. People were more fortunate than the stars; they were bound to the earth, which meant there was a greater chance that one of the people they passed by each day was their vaiy, their soulmate, whose body and blood were of the same distant star as theirs. And because the stars had once been one being, with one mind, soulmates who locked eyes with one another immediately knew the other’s most intimate secret, one that they had never told another living soul, and they would continue to do so each time their gazes met, as secrets changed and eyes grew old.

*

“Seb, I’m a politician. If there’s anyone who knows how to screw a man over and over for twenty years and not mean a thing he says, it’s me.”

There was a moment of silence as they met each other’s eyes. The corner of Grigory’s mouth twitched, Sebastian wagged his eyebrows, and they both burst into laughter.

*

One time, a student asked him if he had ever killed a man. His legendary response: “Do I look like the kind of idiot who would casually confess to murder?”